Flora Launches AI Platform with More Creative Controls, Encourages ‘AI Haters’ to Try it

There are various platforms to help people create videos, art, posters, and all kinds of creative assets. You will also find AI artists selling prompts for the same, instead of the art.

Flora is a new startup, founded by Weber Wong (out of an art & technology graduate program called NYU ITP) which aims to bring together the best of such platforms under one roof geared for creative professionals.

The company’s manifesto states, “We’re a team of creatives who founded Flora to solve our own problem: the lack of creative control in AI.”

The startup is backed by investors like A16Z Games, Menlo Ventures, Long Journey Ventures, and angel investors from Pika, Stability.ai, Midjourney, and more.

The founder states that the current platforms are built by “non-creatives for other non-creatives users to feel creative.”

Wong explained, “Flora has the best AI models and three types of blocks, text, image, and video. Connect blocks together to have creative control over the generative process, more so than just typing into a prompt box.”

The platform supports sharing the project and collaborating with people in real-time. 

While Wong mentioned that it is easy to build creative workflows, you can also find pre-made workflows from the community that you can use. The company has worked with design agencies like Pentagram during its alpha stage to populate the workflows.

In an interaction with TechCrunch, Wong added a strong opinion that the models are not creative tools. However, Flora presents itself as an “infinite canvas”, or a visual interface to help generate various blocks, and connect them together using those models. He emphasised that the model does not matter, or the technology, but the interface.

He further added that he hopes to encourage AI haters to also try Flora.

Flora is available for free with restrictions on the number of projects and history of generation. The pricing for the platform starts at $16 per month.